-
Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday
Heather Merrill
These twelve original essays by geographers and anthropologists offer a deep critical understanding of Allan Pred’s pathbreaking and eclectic cultural Marxist approach, with a focus on his concept of “situated ignorance”: the production and reproduction of power and inequality by regimes of truth through strategically deployed misinformation, diversions, and silences. As the essays expose the cultural and material circumstances in which situated ignorance persists, they also add a previously underexplored spatial dimension to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “moments of danger.”
The volume invokes the aftermath of the July 2011 attacks by far-right activist Anders Breivik in Norway, who ambushed a Labor Party youth gathering and bombed a government building, killing and injuring many. Breivik had publicly and forthrightly declared war against an array of liberal attitudes he saw threatening Western civilization. However, as politicians and journalists interpreted these events for mass consumption, a narrative quickly emerged that painted Breivik as a lone madman and steered the discourse away from analysis of the resurgent right-wing racisms and nationalisms in which he was immersed.
The Breivik case is merely one of the most visible recent examples, say editors Heather Merrill and Lisa Hoffman, of the unchallenged production of knowledge in the public sphere. In essays that range widely in topic and setting—for example, brownfield development in China, a Holocaust memorial in Germany, an art gallery exhibit in South Africa—this volume peels back layers of “situated practices and their associated meaning and power relations.” Spaces of Dangeroffers analytical and conceptual tools of a Predian approach to interrogate the taken-for-granted and make visible and legible that which is silenced.
-
The Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities
Timothy Miller
Commune! The word conjures up images of a few isolated idealists, religious fanatics, and social misfits. A commune is a decidedly marginal blip on the American landscape. Nevertheless communes have studded American history — many thousands of them from the seventeenth century to the present. Although many have heard of the Shakers and (perhaps) the Hutterites and the Harmonists, communes — most of which now prefer to be known as intentional communities — represent a largely hidden slice of American history, despite the fact that they have been home to over a million Americans. Many small studies and surveys of American communal movements have been published over the last two hundred years, but the phenomenon of communal living in its fullness remains largely in the shadows. This work has been compiled to dispel those shadows by providing brief sketches of as many American intentional communities as I have been able to identify from the early days of European colonization down to the present [approximately 3,000]. The work also seeks to provide a few reliable references to primary and secondary sources of information on each community. This second edition contains descriptions of twenty additional communities, and additions and corrections to descriptions of over one hundred communities included in the first edition.
597 pages
-
Jazz Tales from Jazz Legends: Oral Histories from the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College
Monk Rowe and Romy Britell
Distills an oral history project that began in 1995 under the auspices of the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College in Clinton N.Y. Excerpts drawn from 325 one-on-one sessions conducted for the Archive are organized into categories including first-hand accounts of life on the road, inspiration, race and jazz, improvisation, and work inside the studios. Interviewees quoted in the book include icons in jazz world such as Joe Williams, Dave and Iola Brubeck, Jon Hendricks, Steve Allen, and Marian McPartland. Stories from unsung sidemen offer a rare perspective on the life and times of jazz artists who balance the love of music with the sacrifice inherent in the jazz lifestyle. The author provides informative commentary with personal insights into the accomplishments and personalities of over one hundred jazz artists.
209 pages with 13 black and white illustrations
-
How College Works
Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs
Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student’s collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes.
At a liberal arts college in New York, the authors followed a cluster of nearly one hundred students over a span of eight years. The curricular and technological innovations beloved by administrators mattered much less than the professors and peers whom students met, especially early on. At every turning point in students’ undergraduate lives, it was the people, not the programs, that proved critical. Great teachers were more important than the topics studied, and even a small number of good friendships—two or three—made a significant difference academically as well as socially.
For most students, college works best when it provides the daily motivation to learn, not just access to information. Improving higher education means focusing on the quality of a student’s relationships with mentors and classmates, for when students form the right bonds, they make the most of their education.
-
The Worthy Virgins: Mary Purnell and her City of David
Julieanna Frost
The first biography of Mary Purnell who along with her husband Benjamin, led the Israelite House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Mary later formed her own community, Mary’s City of David. Both communities are functioning today. The communities are best known for their bearded baseball teams, but, as Frost’s book shows, they were only a small part of the story.
161 pp., with 19 b/w illustrations
-
The Shakers of White Water, Ohio, 1823-1916
James R. Innis Jr. and Thomas Sakmyster
This work is a comprehensive examination of the history and life of White Water Village by leading experts on the community. As an offshoot of Union Village, the “mother” of Ohio Shaker communities, White Water has received scant attention in the past. This work rectifies the situation and serves as an example of what should be done for all of the Shaker communities.
311 pages with 90 b/w illustrations, 22 music scores, 9 poems, and 9 maps
-
Transformation by Fire: the Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context
Ian Kuijt, Colin P. Quinn, and Gabriel Cooney
This edited volume explores crematory practices as both an archaeological phenomenon and social practice, within cultural constructs. This exploration aims to illustrate the need to view cremation as a study of not only mortuary practices, but also of a dynamic social process that deals with 'death, movement of the body, and final deposition of remains' (Kuijt)"--Provided by publisher. "Ash, bone, and memories are all that remains after cremation. Yet for societies and communities, the act of cremation after death is highly symbolic, rich with complex meaning, touching on what it means to be human. In the process of transforming the dead, the family, the community, and society as a whole create and partake in cultural symbolism. Cremation is a key area of archaeological research, but its complexity has been underappreciated and undertheorized. Transformation by Fire offers a fresh assessment of archaeological research on this widespread social practice. Editors Ian Kuijt, Colin P. Quinn, and Gabriel Cooney's volume examines cremation by documenting the material signatures of cremation events and processes, as well as its transformative impact on social relations and concepts of the body. Indeed, examining why and how people chose to cremate their dead serves as an important means of understanding how people in the past dealt with death, the body, and the social world. The contributors develop new perspectives on cremation as important mortuary practices and social transformations. Varying attitudes and beliefs on cremation and other forms of burial within the same cultural paradigm help us understand what constitutes the body and what occurs during its fiery transformation. In addition, they explore issues and interpretive perspectives in the archaeological study of cremation within and between different cultural contexts. The global and comparative perspectives on cremation render the book a unique contribution to the literature of anthropological and mortuary archaeology
-
Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India
Chaise LaDousa
A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India. Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.
-
Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature
Onno Oerlemans
Given current environmental concerns, it is not surprising to find literary critics and theorists surveying the Romantic poets with ecological hindsight. In this timely study, Onno Oerlemans extends these current ecocritical views by synthesizing a range of viewpoints from the Romantic period. He explores not only the ideas of poets and artists, but also those of philosophers, scientists, and explorers.
Oerlemans grounds his discussion in the works of specific Romantic authors, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, but also draws liberally on such fields as literary criticism, the philosophy of science, travel literature, environmentalist policy, art history, biology, geology, and genetics. He creates a fertile mix of historical analysis, cultural commentary, and close reading. Through this, we discover that the Romantics understood how they perceived the physical world, and how they distorted and abused it. Oerlemans's wide-ranging study adds much to our understanding of Romantic-period thinkers and their relationship to the natural world.
-
Refocusing the Lens: Pranlal K. Patel's Photographs of Women at Work in Ahmedabad
Pranlal K. Patel, Lisa Trivedi, and Robert Knight
About the Exhibit:
This exhibition features photographs taken by well-known Indian photographer Pranlal Patel. Depicting women at work in the homes, neighborhoods, and markets of Ahmedabad, India, in 1937, these images—many of which are on view for the first time—were commissioned by the Jyoti Sangh, a philanthropy dedicated to women’s advocacy, support, and vocational training organization. Lisa Trivedi’s research focuses on the seldom-explored history of women in the workforce in early twentieth-century India.
Refocusing the Lens also examines the early history of photography in India and the role of amateur photographers like Patel. Patel’s approach was noteworthy because he shot in the field rather than in the studio; the resulting images offer an unprecedented documentary view of Indian society. Furthermore, Patel focused upon a subject rarely photographed in India at this time: working-class women. Capturing ordinary aspects of these women’s lives and the enterprises through which they survived, the photographs are important as material products of both philanthropy and photography of the era. They are also important historical artifacts unto themselves, as they were conceived, shaped, and created by women philanthropists, an amateur photographer, and the working women who participated in the photographic process.
-
Shaker Cut-and-Fold Booklets: Unfolding the Gift Drawings of Emily Babcock
Sandra A. Soule
Stark images and inspired messages appear in Shaker cut-and-fold booklets, one of the more unusual forms of gift drawings created in the early 1840s during the Shakers’ internal revival known as Mother’s Work. This study unfolds some of the puzzling aspects of these heavenly communications. The Shaker concept of union is embodied in the mysteriously decorated, interleaved sheets bearing prophetic spiritual messages. New findings about the visionary activities of Emily Babcock point to her as the instrument of these uniquely constructed gift drawings. This volume features full color facsimiles of a number of examples.
97 pages, illustrations
-
Shaker Autobiographies, Biographies and Testimonies, 1806-1907
Glendyne R. Wergland and Christian Goodwillie
In the late eighteenth century a small Shaker community travelled to America under the leadership of "Mother Ann" Lee. The American communities they founded were based on ideals of pacifism, celibacy and gender equality. The texts included in this edition come from first-hand accounts of life in the Shaker communities during the nineteenth century.
-
A Descriptive Bibliography of Imprints from the Israelite House of David and Mary's City of David, 1902-2010
Henry M. Yaple
A comprehensive illustrated bibliography of the printed literature issued by the two Michigan communities famous for their bearded baseball teams!
457 pp., with 93 color illustrations
-
Cronkite's War: His World War II Letters Home
Walter Cronkite, IV and Maurice Isserman
A giant in American journalism in the vanguard of “The Greatest Generation” reveals his World War II experiences in this National Geographic book. Walter Cronkite, an obscure 23-year-old United Press wire service reporter, married Betsy Maxwell on March 30, 1940, following a four-year courtship. She proved to be the love of his life, and their marriage lasted happily until her death in 2005. But before Walter and Betsy Cronkite celebrated their second anniversary, he became a credentialed war correspondent, preparing to leave her behind to go overseas. The couple spent months apart in the summer and fall of 1942, as Cronkite sailed on convoys to England and North Africa across the submarine-infested waters of the North Atlantic. After a brief December leave in New York City spent with his young wife, Cronkite left again on assignment for England. This time, the two would not be reunited until the end of the war in Europe. Cronkite would console himself during their absence by writing her long, detailed letters — sometimes five in a week — describing his experiences as a war correspondent, his observations of life in wartime Europe, and his longing for her.
Betsy Cronkite carefully saved the letters, copying many to circulate among family and friends. More than a hundred of Cronkite’s letters from 1943-45 (plus a few earlier letters) survive. They reveal surprising and little known facts about this storied public figure in the vanguard of “The Greatest Generation” and a giant in American journalism, and about his World War II experiences. They chronicle both a great love story and a great war story, as told by the reporter who would go on to become anchorman for the CBS Evening News, with a reputation as “the most trusted man in America.”
-
The Shaker Spiritual Notices of Eleanor Potter
Jane F. Crosthwaite and Eleanor Potter
Reproduces four sixteen-page manuscript books by Eleanor Potter which record her spirit messages for the leaders of the Shaker Ministry. These manuscripts include spirit drawings as well as text. Crosthwaite provides an introductory essay setting the context for the messages and an analysis of them.
45 pages, illustrations
-
Writings of Shaker Apostates and Anti-Shakers, 1782–1850
Christian Goodwillie
This three-volume collection of writings by Shaker apostates and anti-Shaker individuals brings together thirty-nine texts spanning 1782–c. 1852, comprising the bulk of the corpus of the genre. Texts were selected for inclusion in these volumes based on their relative rarity in institutional and electronic repositories, as well as the lack of a readily available critical or reprinted edition. The goal in the present collection is to offer printed sources that survive in very few copies (in three cases only one) and are therefore largely inaccessible to the public. Each account is prefaced with a headnote that explains its geographical and social context, provides biographical information about the author (where known), delineates key themes or accusations and examines the popular impact of its publication, as well as the particular impact on the Shakers in general, or on a specific Shaker community. Editorial annotations appear throughout the original source texts. These notes provide specific information on individuals, events, or larger concepts in Shakerism.
-
Richard McNemar, Music, and the Western Shaker Communities: Branches of One Living Tree
Carol Medlicott and Christian Goodwillie
The arrival of the Shakers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana in the decades after 1805 saw a substantial escalation in the movement. In Richard McNemar, Music, and the Western Shaker Communities, Carol Medlicott and Christian Goodwillie reconstruct a vast repository of early Shaker hymns, using them to uncover the dramatic history of Shakerism’s bold expansion to the frontier. With newly discovered tunes for more than one hundred Shaker hymns, this volume illuminates a little-known dimension of American folk hymnody.
Medlicott and Goodwillie paint a rich picture of the Shaker west during its most dynamic years. They probe the hymn texts and use them to illuminate the dramatic events of the Shaker west from its founding through the 1830s. They analyze the collection of hymns and hymn tunes in light of the development of Shaker hymnody by the 1830s and of American folk hymnody in general. A series of carefully researched commentaries is presented alongside the score for each hymn, serving to contextualize them individually. One learns of the hymn’s history, its authorship, and its use among the Shakers, making this exploration an invaluable reference for music historians, students of Shaker history, and students of Ohio cultural history.
-
Tyringham Shakers
Stephen J. Paterwic
A compilation of essays and statistical information on the Tyringham Shakers, by one the leading scholars on that community. It is the largest compilation of information on Tyringham in one source. It includes a series of rare of photographs of the village.
142 pages, illustrations
-
Shaker “Great Barns” 1820s-1880s: Evolution of Shaker Dairy Barn Design and Its Relation to the Agricultural Press
Lauren A. Stiles
Shaker leaders built big dairy barns, sent articles and barn diagrams to the specialized agricultural press, and hosted editors and writers on barn tours. This richly illustrated book explores the unexpected relationship between nineteenth century Shaker religious leaders and scientific agricultural journalists.
188 pages, illustrations
-
The Collected Writings of Henry Cumings (1834-1913)
Henry Cumings and Mary Ann Haagen
Henry Cumings was ten years old when he and his family joined the Enfield, New Hampshire, Shakers in 1845. Capable and intelligent, he was entrusted with increasing leadership responsibilities as he came of age. For twenty years he served as one of the Society’s most eloquent spokespersons for a Shaker way of life. In 1881, at the age of forty-five, Cumings reappraised his commitment to Shakerism and left the community. He did not, however, repudiate his Shaker heritage. Between 1904 and 1913 he wrote a series of historical essays for the local newspaper, the Enfield Advocate, in which he shared his personal reflections on Shakerism. Collected here for the first time, this volume of Henry Cumings’ writings offers the reader a lively and detailed account of the Shaker community he knew so well, and its influence on the town of Enfield, New Hampshire.
259 p. , ill.
-
Milton's Rival Hermeneutics: Reason is but Choosing
Richard J. DuRocher and Margaret Olofson Thickstun
Recent critical conversation has described John Milton's major works as sites of uncertainty, irreconcilability, or even confusion — as texts that actually reflect radical incoherence and openness. These newer critical voices posit, moreover, that traditional critics must strain to find coherence and authorial control in Milton's poetry. Richard DuRocher and Margaret Thickstun, together with an esteemed group of Milton scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical backgrounds, respond to this challenge. While accepting the presence of uncertainty and welcoming the multiple perspectives that Milton builds into his works, this volume offers a variety of nuanced approaches to Milton's texts.
-
Episcopal Power and Ecclesiastical Reform in the German Empire: Tithes, Lordship and Community, 950-1150
John Eldevik
Focusing on the way bishops in the eleventh century used the ecclesiastical tithe - church taxes - to develop or re-order ties of loyalty and dependence within their dioceses, this book offers a new perspective on episcopacy in medieval Germany and Italy. Using three broad case studies from the dioceses of Mainz, Salzburg and Lucca in Tuscany, John Eldevik places the social dynamics of collecting the church tithe within current debates about religious reform, social change and the so-called "feudal revolution" in the eleventh century, and analyses a key economic institution, the medieval tithe, as a social and political phenomenon. By examining episcopal churches and their possessions not in institutional terms, but as social networks which bishops were obliged to negotiate and construct over time using legal, historiographical and interpersonal means, this comparative study casts fresh light on the history of early medieval society.
-
A Promising Venture: Shaker Photographs from the WPA
Lesley Herzberg
In 1936 the Index of American Design commissioned photographer Noel Vincentini to photograph the Shaker villages of Mount Lebanon, Hancock, and Watervliet. This book presents the 206 pictures taken by Vincentini. The identifications Vincentini provided were often erroneous. Edward and Faith Andrews, who were employed by the Index to work with Vincentini, corrected many of the identifications, but even those were incomplete. This book presents the complete set of photographs for the first time and with corrected identifications. An introduction by Lesley Herzberg, curator of collections at Hancock Shaker Village, describes the tumultuous series of events that surrounded the production of these images. The book is a companion to an exhibit at Hancock Shaker Village.
239 pages with 214 black and white illustrations
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
